In Falling Without Wings, De La Garza also talks about Demi's success as an actress and singer, sharing that she and her husband, Eddie, optimistically packed up their life in Texas to move to Los Angeles so their three daughters could "pursue acting and singing careers in Hollywood." With that transition, however, came heartache, as Demi, following her success on the Disney Channel and subsequent industry pressures, began to spiral.

In an excerpt exclusively published on EW, De La Garza recounts receiving a harrowing text message from Demi, on tour at the time, after returning home to Texas. In the passage, she recalls "[struggling] to breath" as she received a text that simply read, "I’m sorry ahead of time"—prompting De La Garza to worry that the pop star may have attempted suicide.

"For the past few months, Demi has vacillated between cheerful and sullen, as though her moods are altered by the pull of a string," she writes. "At times, the darkness in her eyes frightens me and her late-night escapades aren’t slowing down, either. It’s clear that something is terribly wrong. A sudden flashback pushes my anxiety even higher."

De La Garza then recalls walking into Demi's bedrooms weeks earlier to wake her, only to find a "bloody rag" next to her sleeping body:

"Demi had started cutting her wrists long before that morning. Once we noticed, we had a family meeting and decided to hire a life coach, figuring that if Demi could sort through the issues behind the cutting, she would stop. And she did. Everything seemed fine until I saw those bloody rags that morning. Despite the alarms that went off in my head, we pushed the incident aside. There wasn’t time for talking. As Demi raced to the studio out one door, I left through another to take Madison, my youngest, to the set of Desperate Housewives."